For details regarding the series: A Story from 10 Words, please read my about page, and feel free to contact me with your own 10 words and I will write you a story!
If you would like to read some of the other submissions, please check out the series page!
This instalment is a continuation of a submission I was given several months back. I had promised a sequel, and here it is. I hope you enjoy it!
“Dreams, my dear, are the subconscious mind’s way of giving voice to our deepest fears.”
Sitting in the doctor’s office, her eyes flashing from one wall to the next, she finds herself more confined and vulnerable than when she awoke from that terrible dream. The nightmare had followed her through every step of every day and she could not shake it. The image of the clown would come screaming into her head, singing his manic songs, and she would find herself crouched in some corner, hugging her knees and gently rocking back and forth to a slow chorus of, ‘no, no, no, no.”
But deny it as she might, the dream never left her. She had not slept for nearly a month and the fragile hold she had on her sanity was starting to slip. She had to speak with someone, but who can you trust when you feel like you may have honestly lost your grip on sanity? Who do you turn to when your mind has betrayed you? Friends are mere shovelers of banalities in the face of such stark reality.
Thus she turned to modern medicine and it appeared that cliches would be her only answer here as well. She refused to visit a psychiatrist because she knew that doing so would be admitting to her very real fear that she had lost her mind, so she went to a brain specialist.
The doctor sat, a flabby monument to indulgence with every seam of his white coat straining to conceal his considerable girth, grinning at her with teeth so white behind a beard so grey she could not help but think of Santa Claus. The doctor splayed his sausage like fingers on the top of his desk and leaned closer to her. He stank of ammonia and Old Spice.
“I can’t find anything abnormal in your scans, so technically there is nothing I can do for you.” He paused and lowered his eyes. A nurse stepped into his office at that moment with a silver tray. “But I want to run a few blood tests, just to be sure.”
The room felt like it was getting smaller and the benign grin on the doctor’s face started to look pasted on. She blinked rapidly and began to shake her head. Something was not right.
“No, I think I am just overanalysing. I just need to get some rest.”
She made to stand up and the nurse placed a hand on her. She collapsed back into the chair with a thud and the room began to swim. She was slipping again, but this could not be happening. She knew she was awake. She had to be.
“I think you are taking this all much too lightly my dear. I don’t think you truly appreciate the gravity of your situation.”
The nurse began to prepare a needle to take her blood and she tried to pull her arm away, but it was strapped down to the chair. She looked down in horror and saw that her whole upper body had been strapped down. What the hell was happening? She began to panic and when she looked back up the whole room had changed.
The white walls of the doctor’s office had been replaced by barbed wire. In place of plaques there were cuts of meat, dripping with blood and covered in flies. The room had gone from stark white to the colour of rust, or dried blood. The doctor’s desk was replaced by a table saw that spat out black smoke as the sick blade spun maliciously between her and the doctor. Bones covered the desk and littered the floor in small piles like castoffs and she found that panic had been replaced by the sudden rush of adrenaline that only comes when a person is faced with certain death.
“You see my dear,” the doctor said, pulling off his face with a sick sucking sound that reminded her a child trying to inhale jello through a straw, “you and I had a game that we did not get to finish, and I will see it to the end.” When the doctor tossed the flabby skin off into the corner she knew who she would find before the blood finished dripping off the perfect white mask. Her tormentor, her nightmare, and the only being she knew she could never escape.
It was the goddamn clown.
The sick smile on his face and the lunatic glee in his eyes were more than she could stand. She began to thrash in the chair when the nurse plunged the needle into her arm. Her blood began to flow into it, but there was no collection tube. Her blood was pumping out of her in spurts onto her legs and into her lap.
The nurse then leaned over, the stench of centuries old garbage and piss radiating off her in waves, and licked her face from line of her jaw all the way to her temple. The feel of that thing’s saliva on the side of her face was like acid and she felt her skin begin to burn from it. She now battled the twin need of stopping the blood pumping out of her and wiping the filth from her face that was boiling the very skin off of her.
The nurse sauntered around the back of the chair as Smiley laughingly ran his sausage fingers over the table saw, sending his thick fingers careening around the room while blood showered her face and chest. She began to gag at the incredible stench of blood and death that filled the room.
She had to get out of the damn chair.
“You know the most wonderful thing about hospitals, my dear?” the clown asked, leaning forward as his eyes light up even brighter and a small stream of smoke seethed from between his teeth. “All the sharp objects.”
The nurse jabbed a second needle into her other arm and her vision started to blur. She was losing blood too fast and she was still strapped into the chair. How the hell was she going to get out?
The nurse slunk around the desk to where the clown sat and began to stroke his brightly coloured hair. She was emaciated, her skin the sickly colour of an avocado going bad with the scattered black spots of full blown rot peppering her arms and legs. She bobbed and swirled like a stripper, but not to be sexy. This was Frankenstein’s whore and she had been very badly made.
“It’s only a matter of time now, poppet.”
When a human being is presented with the option of death or drastic measure, drastic measure can often appear much more plausible than it should be. She could not get out of the chair, so the chair would have to come with her. Her smiling tormentor was leaning so far over the desk now that his face was mere inches from her. She would only have one shot, so she would have to be quick and not mess it up.
Mustering the last of her strength she stood with the chair strapping her arms to it, the blood from her veins flooding out in an even greater torrent, and she brought herself down on top of the clown. She felt the power of the table saw that spun around his midsection begin to tear his body to pieces and the clown cursed and spat as his fingerless hands flailed. Blood and gore was cast in all directions as the weight of her body pinned him to his favourite toy and she could feel her life pumping out of her.
At least she would not die alone. But she had thought she killed this demon the last time, who was to say he would actually die this time? She had to believe it though, otherwise it was just a futile action in the last moments before her death. No one wants to believe they died in vain.
The nurse came back around the desk and ripped her off of the clown, tossing her back against the far wall in a feat of strength that would have awed a god. She crashed bodily into the barbwire and it tore at her back. The chair cracked and split, freeing her from its hold, and she fell to the ground with a thud. She tore the needles from her arms with shaking hands and tried to stand. The nurse was ambling toward her in the shaking half drunk saunter of a two dollar whore with a huge blade in her hand. The weapon was rusted horribly and there were chunks of flesh still clinging to the serrated blade. The nurse’s purple tongue darted from her mouth and she began to lick her lips. She raised the blade in her arm and swung it back and forth with savage strength.
Struggling to her feet, the woman now faced a new foe and no weapon with which to defend herself. She looked around at her feet and found the broken pieces of the chair. There was one leg that was still relatively in tact, if she could swing it hard enough. The one factor on her side was that the nurse was incredibly slow.
The demon lunged at the woman and swung her blade, but the nurse was a tick to slow. The woman was able to crack her right in the face with the leg of the chair and stumble to the other side of the room. She had hoped there would be a door of some kind somewhere in the room, but her search brought back nothing. Now she was back behind the dead clown and the nurse was turning to make after her again. Her eyes darted from wall to wall and she remembered the slabs of meat hanging from the wall behind her. She turned and tried to pull one from the wall. It was impossibly heavy. Stars flooded her vision and she was forced to press her face into the rotten meat. Flies beat her about the face and the smell that filled her nostrils caused her to vomit, but she refused to let go. The meat began to give way and finally it unhinged from its home.
Just as she was about to congratulate herself she felt a searing pain shoot across her back and she knew the nurse had slashed her. She spun with inhuman strength accompanied by a final flood of adrenaline and hurled the meat at the nurse. It knocked her back into the desk and the woman heard several bones in the nurse’s body crack and snap like dried wood.
Dizzy, sick, and on the verge of passing out from loss of blood, the woman turned back to find what she had been hoping for when she went after the meat in the first place. She had to end this because, broken bones or not, that nurse was not going to give up so easily. She blinked half blinded by blurry white lights obscuring her vision and found what she needed. The woman ripped the meat hook off the wall and turned back to the desk.
The nurse was struggling to her feet, a broken leg bone protruding from her rotted skin, and the woman brought the meat hook down in a terrible fury. The sharpened end dug into the crown of the nurse’s skull and she began to twitch and dance even more frantically than before. Her hands lost their grip on the knife and she started to grab at the weapon dug into her head. The woman reached out and took hold of it first, pulling and twisting away in a panic when she thought of what this beast could do if it extricated the hook successfully, and the nurse’s whole head dislodged along with the weapon.
The woman tossed them both into the corner of the room and slumped to her knees. She began to sob in exhausted horror as she stared down at her arms, which had been caked in her own blood and vomit. She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that she had finally returned to sleep after nearly a month of fighting it, and that this was the world she would be subjected to each time she dozed off until she found the source of its creation. This was more than a nightmare, this was a sign, and she had to understand it if she wanted to end it.
“Now ya on the right track there, missy. Just gotta find you the source of this here train, and you maybe got a chance of derailing it for good.”
She looked up into the amber eyes of the dark skinned man and sobbed.
“Now, now. Ain’t no use in cryin’. You got a job to do.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” she screamed hoarsely.
“Ain’t no one never ask for nothin’ like this. That’s what life is. They give you this but you paid for that. Only answer is to take what you been given and walk on. Now,” the man said, holding out a strong hand, “you gonna get up and walk, or lay down and die?”
She raised her eyes to meet his and clenched her jaw.
He flashed a crooked smile and licked his full lips.
“That’s my girl.”
The amber man handed her something and she struggled to focus her eyes on it. It was a plane ticket. Just before she passed from nightmare into restful sleep she had time to wonder one last thing. What the hell would she find in Japan?
If you would like your own story, please feel free to contact me with 10 words, a theme (it can be a genre, favourite movie or book) and a song and I will write you a story as well! I am open to any and all submissions!
In the coming months I will be posting Raeyna’s story & Laura’s Story. I haven’t forgotten you! Thank you so much for your patience, and I hope you will enjoy your stories!
Sticks and Stones 